F8, hacked Google, Uber transparency and more in the Programmable Edition #92
Last week was the Facebook annual developer meeting, the now infamous F8. Two big topics there: chatbots, and AR (augmented reality)/MR (mixed reality).
On the first topic, no groundbreaking evolutions despite the launch of a Messenger Platform V2, but a good signal from Facebook that they still believe in the ability of conversational interfaces to transform the way brands address their consumers.
On the second one, Facebook showed some work on VR (chatting with weird Mii-like avatars of your friend), but the real and new deal was AR. After copycatting Snapchat on AR features, Facebook now prepares for delivering developers a tooling platform to build AR on top of apps with ease. Their work on SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is pretty spectacular.
With this acceleration on AR, Facebook gets ready for the time AR enabled products (phones) and soon MR — mixed reality — enabled ones (glasses, lenses etc.) will hit the market. It will have the ecosystem (tools and content) in place to lead the battle on these new interfaces with other companies also moving fast in this space, namely Apple and Google.
Have a good week,
Thomas
O.K. Google, what is the Whopper burger?
Don’t let your home assistant next to your TV. After a TV show accidentally triggered thousands of dollhouses purchase orders for Amazon’s Alexa owners, Burger King stroke a blow in a TV ad, by purposely hacking Google‘s home assistants to promote its iconic burger. Undue or Genius ?
It’s Apple’s turn to dive into life sciences
Apple is now challenging Google’s moonshot to tackle diabetes: a secret team is working on a non-invasive device to track blood sugar, an initiative that could potentially turn Apple Watches into essential medical devices for millions of people — if successful.
Uber financials unveiled
Uber is playing on transparency to dampen all the dubious stories it’s currently facing and has publicly published its financial information — a première for the quite secretive company. All in all, the mystery remains: revenues are reaching record high levels while Uber is still loosing… a billion dollar a quarter.
AirBnB vs Hotels : the empire strike back
A leaked document just disclosed the hotel industry 2017 strategy to aggressively counter its biggest rival, with regulation and public opinion as main levers: not only AirBnB would do unfair competition, but it would be accountable for raising cost of housing in major cities, a cherished topic of U.S Politics… Game on.
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